AMD Radeon RAMDisk Review

Windows 7 Start Up with Boot Time A/V Scan Performance

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. SInce Windows 7 has become nearly ubiquitous for solid state drive enthusiasts we have chosen Windows 7 64bit Ultimate as our Operating System. In previous load time tests we would use the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line; this however is no longer the case. We have not only added in a secondary Anti-Virus to load on startup, but also an anti-malware program. We have set Super Anti-Spyware to initiate a quick scan on Windows start-up and the completion of the quick scan will be our new finish line.

OS load times are actually the Achilles’ heel of AMD’s RamDisk software. By making the drive non-volatile, the software has to reload all of its data on start-up and even with compression, this does take time. The larger the RamDisk – or more specifically the more data stored on the RamDisk – the longer start up and shutdown will take. By the same token, the OS is actually useable faster than this time would lead you to believe, it just that the HDD was pushing so much data to the RAM that our Virus Scan slowed down.

Adobe CS5 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. In this case, CS5 was completely installed onto the RAMDisk for its benchmark numbers.

When a given hardware configuration gets above a certain level of performance, any improvements tend to become rather academic. AMD’s RamDisk results show some blazingly fast performance, even with the 1600MHz memory we had installed. Programs just load so fast that even SSDs seem slow by comparison. Against hard drives, this is like comparing the Cray Titan to an abacus.